Impressionists at the post … And they’re off!
“Race Horses” by Edgar Degas, stabled at the Musée d’Orsay
After decades of rural landscapes lining the walls of the Paris salons, French painters in the 1860s turned to modern urban life. Edouard Manet led the parade of Parisians at play with “Luncheon on the Grass” and quickly had a rival in Edgar Degas, with his always popular ballet scenes.
Their interest converged here at fashionable Longchamp racecourse, which opened in 1857, during Napoleon III’s Second Empire, an integral element in Baron Haussmann’s replanned city. At the Bois de Boulogne home of “le Jockey Club”, seen here in a Google Earth image, Degas initially tried and failed to reproduce the imagery he’d seen in British racing prints and Gericault’s paintings of English horse races, and Manet at first struggled too.
